Page 294 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Change architecture: blocks
1 Leverage with processes and behaviours and values will follow. Here she argues that
values and ‘meanings’ are outcomes of change, not levers to create change.
2 Understand the forces for and against change. In essence the force field idea.
Interestingly for this review of change architecture, Gratton argues that the jour-
ney forwards to create new strategy includes four further guiding principles:

1 Continue to build guiding coalitions.
2 Build the capacity to change.
3 Keep focusing on the themes.
4 Build performance measures noting that leading measures are in the field of
people development, behaviour and attitudes, living measures are of perform-
ance and lagging measures include financial performance.
This is too simplistic. To argue that leading measures are to be found only in
measures to do with people is wrong. If you are looking at an engineering busi-
ness, quite obviously technology capabilities are important as leading measures.
Could the success or failure of the Wellcome Trust-funded Human Genome proj-
ect be judged at the point of committing funding only, or even largely, on the
characteristics of people – many of whom were not yet involved? Could you
assess whether or not to fund a Mars project with NASA by looking only at peo-
ple issues? This is just too narrow. It argues that we replace one extreme with
another. Nevertheless there is a sense running through the approach that you do
need to have regard to the design of the strategy and (by implication) the strate-
gic change process.

CASE
STUDY The BBC

This case study outlines what was a radical change at the BBC – an initiative known as
‘Producer Choice’ which was implemented in the 1990s. For us it is of interest because:

1 It was a logical extension of various resource utilization studies and change pro-
grammes which began to be implemented in the late 1980s.
2 The change was based on an explicit theoretical model (Burke and Litwin, 1992).
3 We are able to assess the changes in terms of ‘change architecture’.

Producer Choice was adopted in spring 1993 and represented a radical shift of culture and
ways of working. Before Producer Choice, all budgets were held centrally and delegated
to departments. Programme makers did not have budgets, rather they accessed resources
with which to make programmes. The underlying idea, therefore, was to assign budgets
to programme makers and allow them to utilize outside resources – this was intended not
least to focus attention on the true cost of programmes, on value for money and on mar-
ket comparisons of efficiency, quality and so on.
Announced late in 1991, it was proposed that the period to April 1993 be devoted to
preparatory work – of which much was needed. Training and development programmes
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